


Bones Set, Wounds Healed

by BMP



Category: Magnificent Seven (TV)
Genre: Gen, Mag7 Bingo Challenge, OW
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-07
Updated: 2012-04-07
Packaged: 2017-11-03 05:54:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/378033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BMP/pseuds/BMP
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Freedom means having choices.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bones Set, Wounds Healed

**Author's Note:**

> Beware offensive language!  
> Written for Mag7 Bingo (Round 2). Prompt--Lacerations/Knife Wounds
> 
> Not mine. Alas. But if the sandbox does someday belong to me, I would still let you all come play.
> 
> Special thanks to V for the read-through and kind suggestions. You can blame me for all the errors I couldn't find and destroy. Thanks always to GSister. Without her insistence, none of these stories would ever have been.

**Bones Set, Wounds Healed**

The first time Nathan saw the boys, they were standing below his balcony as he hung threadbare quilts over the railing to air. 

"Wouldn't let no filthy nigger touch me even if I was dyin'."

If the words were meant to bait him, the young fool had missed his mark. Compared to the lashes that had cut the scars into Nathan's broad back, words could hardly make him flinch.

They boys squinted as they looked up at Nathan's sign, the one he had taken such pains to be sure was readable at a distance. Barely able to read, he supposed. He knew the kind. Filthy down to their toes, inside and out, and needing to be better than somebody. 

Both of 'em were barely halfway out of their teens, big awkward feet poking out of worn out shoes and bony shoulders sticking out. Ragged, too big overalls hung off them, a short length of twine around the waist keeping them from making a public spectacle. Full of youth and vigor. Looking for a way to fill up the gnawing emptiness—the desire to be someone. Someone people noticed. Someone people saw. Respected. Like they knew the word. Standing there with every inch of emptiness filled up with hate.

The only difference between 'em seemed to be one had long greasy hair and the other had short greasy hair. 

Out of habit, Nathan conjured up all the ways these two ragged cast-offs could take it into their heads to do him or his clinic harm if they had a mind to. But he took his misgivings in hand. He towered over both of them. And he was strong. And he was smart. And Lord knew his fight was on the right side. He was no one's slave and no master was ever going to make him cower again. Even when those men had dragged him toward a certain death by lynching, not even then had he bowed his head. And he wasn't going to bow it to these two shirt-tail young-uns. 

"You boys need something?" he asked. He let the words rumble out from deep inside his chest, and carry down to them, low and calm, and correct. The way they spoke in the big houses. Not in the swamps and mining camps and the mills and hardscrabble farms that spat these two out into the world.

The short-haired one flinched first and looked a long way up at him with eyes that hadn't learned yet to hide themselves and not go lookin' so wide open and scared. "No sir," the boy stammered.

The long-haired one spat a glob of phlegm, pale and sticky onto the dirt, and glared at his companion.

"Ain't no _sir_ here," the boy said to his companion slowly and deliberately and loud enough for Nathan to hear. "Just you and me and that dirty nigger up there."

He turned a face that still showed freckles across the bridge of his nose up toward Nathan. If he was looking for a reaction, Nathan knew he was going to be disappointed.

"Naw," the boy said, speaking in Nathan's direction. "Reckon we don't need nothin' from your kind."

Nathan regarded both of them from his position above them. His voice stayed steady and even. Neither hardening nor giving ground. "You best move along then." He couldn't make it much plainer that he didn't want anything from them either.

The long-haired one spat again and didn't move a step. Marking time, Nathan suspected, so Nathan would know the boy wasn't under any obligation to leave just 'cause Nathan might want him to.

Nathan straightened a quilt on the railing, and turned up his sleeves, pushing them up over his forearms with deliberate care. He crossed his arms slowly over his chest and looked, unblinking, back at them. 

The short-haired one's eyes flickered nervously between his companion and Nathan. And Nathan was hard-pressed to know whether the boy was more of a coward or just had sense enough to imagine the ease with which a man of Nathan's size could make short work of running them both up the street and out into the alleys with the rest of the refuse. 

"I said," Nathan repeated. Everyone deserved a chance to repent of stupidity before reaping their reward. "You'd best be moving along."

The short-haired one swallowed. His feet twitched toward the stair. "Come on, Ike," he said, the words a thready, fearful whisper. Nathan heard it just the same.

Ike. Nathan tried to recall anyone of that name in the area. Nothing came immediately to mind. New? Maybe passing through?

Ike gave Nathan a long glance, sizing him up. 

The other one let out a relieved breath when Ike took his first steps, away and toward the street, scuffing the dirt like he had nowhere else he needed to be. 

Nathan watched them walk away. 

He committed the boys to memory. He would mention it to Josiah and the others as soon as he had the opportunity. At the moment, he had some herbs to prepare and a poultice to make. He had people who needed him. So he bent his mind to the task of healing. Though he was well aware that more than one of his "patients" had to swallow a bellyful of pride to call for the "darkie healer." "'Cause the town didn't have no proper doctor."

Didn't that beat all in this land of freedom and opportunity?

Behind the closed door of his tiny clinic, his home, Nathan pounded his frustration into the pestle, grinding hatred into tiny pieces along with the dried leaves that would ease stomach ailments and sleeplessness, nerves and fevers, sniffles, aches, and sores. 

 

The next time he saw them, Nathan knew their names. Zeke and Ike Shaw. Brothers. Their pa put down stakes in a tiny spread just west of town sometime last summer. Kept to themselves mostly. And people avoided them. The winter had not been kind. Folks said the very second spring broke free, Mrs. Shaw did, too. Leaving a farm, two half-grown boys, and a husband behind her. 

The two half-grown boys seemed to have nothing useful to do but run off to town, where they also had nothing useful to do. Except in Ike's case, which, at the moment, meant pitching sharp pebbles at the tiny one-eyed kitten that had treed itself on one of the supports holding up the eaves by Virgil Watson's store. It bared tiny fangs and hissed. 

"Stop it! Stop it!" 

Emmaline Arden, six and a ball of fury, stood in the street, with her tiny fists clenched and hissing for all she was worth, too.

Nathan looked around. Closed doors. People moving along on business. No one seemed to care what happened to a little girl's kitten on a dull afternoon.

He wondered where his fellow peacekeepers were. Likely this wasn't high on their lists of jobs to do today either.

Not that Nathan was scared of Zeke or Ike Shaw. Or their old man either. But he knew better than to up and go looking for trouble. Trouble had a way of finding a man all on its own. 

Emmaline had spotted him now and come running. She was sobbing at about the height of his knee. "Mr. Jackson! They'll hurt him! Make them stop!" 

He couldn't ignore her plea. No one should. So he moved across the street, the little girl in his wake, and stepped right up to the cat.

He didn't say a word to either boy. Not even when the hail of pebbles pelted around him. 

They were only pebbles after all. He had been hit with worse.

He lifted down the little orange and white ball of anger. It wrapped limbs about his wrist and poked sharp, suspicious claws furiously into his flesh and tried to sink its teeth into him, too. He handed the creature down. It was still spitting and its ears were still laid back, but the little girl gathered it into her arms all the same.

He looked at both boys.

The pebbles lay still in Ike's palm, which was now covered by Zeke's knobby-knuckled, too big hand. The boys, Nathan noted, up close now, had a ways to go yet before they grew into those big clumsy paws. 

Nathan had heard too, that their daddy was too mean and drunk to properly supervise that growin'. Heard tell Old Man Shaw liked to take his anger out on his wife and, when she left, on the boys. Maybe standing around in town was their bid for freedom, their escape, when the old man finally exhausted himself raging at the world or was just too drunk to light out after them. 

Maybe it took a while for white boys to break free. Maybe it took them longer to realize how captive they were.

Nathan caught Zeke's limp, the way he dragged that left leg as he turned away, stumbling just a little. Injury still healing or injury badly healed. Nathan couldn’t be sure without Zeke rolling up that patched pant leg and letting him have a look.

Ike caught Nathan watching and sent back a glare of purest venom before pushing Zeke along ahead of him. 

Nathan watched a moment longer before turning back toward his own business.

A tiny thud of a pebble plinked between Nathan's shoulder blades as he walked away. The words "uppity nigger" thudded hard against a place inside him that was older and deeper. A place where resentments burned hotter and temptations were harder to resist. 

But he did not give in. He walked on. 

 

The third time Nathan saw the boys, he knew there was trouble. He didn't reckon there was much honor in laying out a mere boy. Even if the boy had it coming. If he had to put Ike Shaw down, he would do it as quick and easy as possible. 

But it wasn't Ike who came charging up his steps, cold steel glinting in his hand. 

Nathan wasn't going to show any more fear of Zeke than he had of Ike. Gun or no gun. 

He met him at the head of the stairs. 

"You need something?" he asked. His voice was low and deadly and filled with menace. A clear warning if the boy had the brains to see it.

It stopped Zeke right in his tracks.

The gun trembled as he raised it to Nathan's face.

"You gonna come with me," Zeke said. His voice trembled like the gun.

"That so?"

Keeping his expression calm was easy for Nathan. He hadn't been much more than a baby when he learned how to teach his eyes not to show his thoughts and to teach his face not to show his feelings and to tell his voice to show no fear or rage or any of those things white folks feared, that sent them into rages. 

But that didn't mean he could always keep his voice from having "the tone". The tone was the reason for his first taste of the lash and his last. They could no more beat that "uppity" tone out of him, than Nathan could teach himself to keep it out of his voice. Truth was, that tone was his secret friend. The kind of bad friend who gets you into bad trouble. And bad trouble taught him to be strong.

The tone was in his voice now.

Zeke's eyes flew wide. One of them was decorated with the blotched evidence of a fight, days old already. But they were fierce and they sparked. White folks didn't know nothing about schooling their expressions. They never had to. The boy's entire body vibrated like the gun in his hand. But it wasn't fury that Nathan read there.

"You ain't gonna get what you want by pointin' a gun in my face," Nathan said. 

"Ike said you wouldn't come," Zeke said. "Said to make you."

Nathan pressed the barrel down and away, away from both of them, while the boy was distracted by the words that dribbled from his lips. "You gotta come. He's hurt."

"You don't need no gun to ask for help," Nathan said, his tone tart. "All you got to do is ask."

He peeled the gun out of Zeke's hands. And noticed the blood.

"What happened?"

Zeke's words stuttered to a halt.

Nathan reined in his temper. He spoke slowly, evenly, clearly. "I need to know what happened so I know what I'll need to bring."

The boy's eyes went bleak. "Pa."

He stuttered.

"After the last time, he said he was sorry an' it wasn't gonna happen again. So we made sure. Ike and me. We emptied out the whiskey and hid the bottles. This morning Pa found the bottles. He went crazy. Started breakin' 'em. We didn’t' know what he was doin' 'til he was after us." The boy's eyes were huge with the memory. "I was closest," he said.

Nathan's belly went cold. 

"Ike stopped him."

_Oh Lord._

"Is he dead?"

"Got cut up. Bleedin' bad." The boy was panting. "Arm's broke."

Nathan's mind went to his saddlebags and what he was gonna need. The boy mistook the silence for callousness. 

"Please," he begged. A jagged tear gaped in his sleeve.

"Tell the stable hand to saddle my horse," Nathan snapped out. They boy turned and all but threw himself down the balcony steps. But not before Nathan saw the relief in his pale face.

Nathan had his saddlebags filled and in his hand before Zeke had made it all the way to the stables.

The limp.

Nathan's eyes told him it was probably a badly healed break. He'd probably limp forever.

But he was limping as fast as he could.

"Where are your father and brother now?"

While Zeke answered, Nathan ordered the nearest livery hand to go find one of the town's other six protectors and tell them to send a couple men out to the Shaw place.

Zeke's horse was a pathetic swaybacked plowhorse. In a fair world, it would have been put out to pasture to be a patient plaything for little ones. Knowing what Nathan did about most folks, the horse was probably going to die in harness, worked to death.

"Follow me," Nathan barked out. "But I'm not waiting for you."

He turned his fine horse in the street and raced toward the west.

 

Nathan knew better than to expect a welcome. Not even when he was called. It was hard enough for people to just send for him sometimes. He couldn't expect them to be grateful, too--even when they needed him.

He came in cautiously, trotting into the yard and calling out toward the house. 

Old Man Shaw was in the yard, which was all brown dirt and struggling yellowed weeds. Skinny livestock milled about nervously inside a lopsided corral fence. Shaw raged out a mouthful of hate, spewing epithets at both the filthy nigger and the traitorous bitch and her bastard children, no sons of his, bastards since the day they were born. Since he could do no more, he railed and threatened, straining at the twine that lashed his wrists to the fence and ordering Nathan to get the hell off his property. Nathan noted a livid welt across the old man's face and hair matted down with blood. He walked on by and into the house, calling for Ike.

Inside the open front door, his boots scuffed against a broken bottle, and it rolled unevenly on the dirt floor. Its neck had been snapped off. Crude. And vicious.

It took a moment for Nathan's eyes to adjust to the dim interior of the cabin, for the signs of the struggle Zeke described to come fully into view.

Ike was on the floor behind an overturned table. Nathan's eyes swept over the cut over one eye, and another along his forearm. A cloth bandage was tied clumsily around the upper part of his other arm. Even with the bandage, blood trailed down his forearm and dripped off his knuckle to be swallowed by the dirt. Nathan wondered if either of these fool boys had had the sense to raise Ike's arm to slow the bleeding. He noted the limb's odd and sickening angle.

The boy was barely conscious. But he recognized Nathan's face when he knelt down beside him.

Nathan's knife sang when he drew it out of its sheath. Ike's face went a shade whiter still.

"Yer gonna kill me," he said, suddenly struggling, animated by fear. He pushed away from Nathan and his knife.

He started screaming. Echoed by the hollering of the man tied up in the yard and the sound of horses.

On one bleeding arm, Ike dragged himself backward, panicked. And screamed out when Nathan reached for him. "He's gonna cut my throat! Don't let the nigger kill me!"

"He ain't," Zeke said, suddenly there. And in the way, wedging himself into the too-crowded space between the table and the wall. He held Ike's head in his hands. "I brought him just like you said. He ain't gonna kill you."

Nathan didn't waste any more time. He put the point of his knife against Ike's arm. "Hold him good," he commanded.

Nathan didn't wait to see if his order was obeyed. He slid the knife under the blood-soaked cloth and sliced the bandages free. Ike bucked when Nathan pulled the clotted cloth away from the jagged wound. 

Voices mingled with the hollering out in the yard. Familiar voices. Nathan didn't look up when a shadow crossed the sunlit doorway and paused a moment. He could tell who stood there from the shape of the hat silhouetted on the floor. He was glad to see that shadow. 

But he kept his focus on Ike, looking the boy straight in the eye. Calm and steady. Held his gaze. "You need to hold still now," Nathan said. "I ain't going to hurt you any more than I have to. But that arm's got to be cleaned and stitched and that bone's gotta be set. This ain't gonna be no Sunday picnic."

"You need some help?" Vin's voice asked from the door. The hollering outside had stopped. 

"Hold him down," Nathan snapped. Vin moved. In an instant, he had the boy more securely pinned, growling at Zeke to get a better hold or get out of the way. Zeke looked like he was more scared of Vin than of Nathan or the blood or even dyin'. Nathan spared a tiny smile. That he could understand. Zeke made a noise in his throat, but he refused to abandon his brother's side. Nathan's smile widened and he hid it as he concentrated on the arm and his knife. 

Ike's eyes rolled like a frightened horse. "Don’t!" he gasped out. Zeke looked like he might be sick. 

_Wouldn't let no filthy nigger touch me even if I was dyin'._

The words came back. Truth was, without Nathan, Ike might've been. Or he might have lived and learned how to use an arm as crooked and badly set as Zeke's leg. He must have been mighty scared when he told Zeke to take the gun. 'Cause no one would come help, that right? 

Nathan pulled bandages tight to stop the bleeding. No nigger would come help just 'cause it was right.

Nathan braced the arm still with his knee while he worked a shard of bone out into the daylight. Curses spewed out of Ike's mouth, drowning Zeke's attempts to soothe. 

"Goddamn whoresonofabitch nigger shit…" 

Like fathers, like sons, Nathan thought.

The boy was a little too young yet to carry all the blame. 

The cursing subsided into sobs. The voices mingled until Nathan couldn’t tell which boy was sobbing and which was soothing. 

He could mend the arm. And Ike would live. If he did as Nathan told him.

And if he did, then maybe every day he looked on that scar might remind him why he still had two good arms. And maybe he might feel some shame for the hate and the pain. 

Until then, Nathan took no pleasure in the hurt. He had never had it in him to enjoy another person's pain. His knives, like his choices, had two edges. 

He could choose. He had his freedom, and he could choose. 

Choose anew every day. 

Nathan Jackson chose his knives carefully. The right knife for the right purpose. This one's purpose was to heal.


End file.
